I want to stress that I never intended for things to get as fucked up as they did, but fucked up, they got.
Oh, I'm sure this will be good.
So, this was after everything with Thomas Maxwell went down. That whole timeline was a shit show. The Director grabbed me after I fucked it all up and said, "fix this shit." I'd kind of fucky-wuckied the whole timeline, so I didn't have much choice.
Alright, I guess I should stop and say that I'm not the physical Robert Maxwell who experienced this stuff, I just have his memories, OK? Personally, I think I'm better off not being him, he had a shit time.
Back to the story. This is the beginning of what I'll call the "Andriesen Assassination Complex," or AAC. It turns out that the Andriesen sisters--Simone and Nikki, both of whom I was banging at one time or another--
What a great detail. I really needed to know.
It's relevant!
As I was saying, they turned out to be fulcrum points for a lot of important future events. Not necessarily things they directly influenced, but butterfly-effect type stuff. Now, I had wiped out all of Magna to create that cursed timeline, right?
I remember.
You might imagine that it wasn't the easiest thing in the world to go up against somebody who'd put that in motion, especially when that somebody was also me, so he'd know all the tricks I was likely to pull.
But you'd know his tricks, too, wouldn't you?
Yeah, you'd think it would cancel out, but imagine trying to think two steps ahead of a version of yourself that's trying to think two steps ahead of you, too. How many steps ahead can you really get? Not many!
However, I did know the plan, because I created and executed it. But once I started meddling with it, the me that was still in the process of executing it would be sure to respond.
His first approach to wiping out Magna was pretty blunt. Just a bunch of well-placed bombs, all timed to go off at once, informed by the knowledge of where every single member of Magna would be at that specific moment. Yes, including the kids. I don't know what to tell you. "All of them" means "all of them."
Whatever helps you sleep at night.
Ha, ha. It doesn't.
Knowing all these bombs were set to go off at once, the first and most obvious solution is just disarm them all, so that was the first thing I tried.
So he just rearmed them.
Clearly, disarming alone wasn't going to work. I moved them.
He just made more and replaced them.
You see where this is going?
Not quite, other than nowhere good.
What ultimately happened was, he tricked me. In this whole shuffle of bombs, he got me mixed up and had me thinking a live bomb was a disarmed one, and it ended up being the one assigned to Simone Andriesen, and it killed her. Number one, I was incredibly upset because I actually liked her.
But you killed all of them, didn't you? Seems like you were throwing personal feelings out the window at that point.
OK, I was over all that by this point, remember? I was no longer team "must kill Magna" but had instead become team "Magna is fine, probably, find another solution." So, I wanted to keep Simone around. Plus, the future apparently needed her, too.
You're gonna have to tell me what happens without her. I need a mental picture.
The War pops off about 20 years early and I'm never even born, that's kind of the central issue. It also renders Earth almost totally uninhabitable for human life. There are some survivors but it's a pretty dismal situation. It ended up being worse than wiping out Magna completely, which "only" produced a horrible dystopia rather than a devastated post-apocalypse.
I'd take the dystopia, too. Probably.
I decided I needed to try to reason with the other me, which maybe I should have tried originally, but we Robert Maxwells are stubborn and tend not to respond to calm negotiation. I ultimately confronted him and told him what I was doing and why he had to stop. He figured if anyone was qualified to stop him, it would be the Director, and if the Director wasn't going to come stop him... directly... then what he was doing must not have been too bad.
Why didn't the Director take care of it, then?
He's kind of busy. He's not my personal Deus-Ex-Maxwell, you know. His attitude was more, "your mess, you clean it up." Which I guess was fair, it just made the whole thing very annoying. The extent of his involvement was dropping me back at the checkpoint automatically each time I failed, since Inferno was out of play due to DANTE's "don't interfere when Maxwells are fighting each other" rule.
I had infinite retries but what did it matter if I kept losing?
I even thought, if I just dealt with the bomb that got Claudia, the rest would be fine. But no, he would just make it take out someone else, and the results were generally bad. Did I mention that whenever I tried to hunt him down to talk to him, he would run away? Very helpful. You'd think he would have noticed DANTE locking him out and taken that as a sign something was up, but instead he thought I was an evil doppelganger trying to ruin his perfect plan. I suppose that's a very Robert Maxwell thing to assume.
And you couldn't just take him to the fucked up future and show him because the Director wasn't going to do that and DANTE wouldn't, either. What a mess.
Yeah, you see the problem. Problems?
Well, nothing said I couldn't just fucking kill him, so that's what I wound up doing. I caught him right at the instant before he armed all the bombs, put one in the back of his head, that was that. There was no other version of him to deal with since he didn't technically survive to execute his plan to begin with. Simone didn't die, none of them died. I mean, none of them died prematurely. Obviously, a bunch of them died later. OK, some of them did die "prematurely." Like, if anything other than totally natural causes is "premature," then most of them died prematurely. But it wasn't because I killed them. That's the important part.
Yes, it's great that you were able to keep them alive for other things to kill them. That's a lot better. The guy with the time machine, just letting people die according to plan.
I have to weigh each decision carefully, you know. Ripple effects.
You say that even though your big plan was... mass assassinate a couple hundred people at once?
What can I say? I have learned and grown. I've done a lot of work on myself.